Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Lots of short entries

A couple of weeks ago, when working on the entry about salaries for bloggers, I did a quick analysis of the entries in a day slice. Many people pointed out that this was a small slice and was not representative of what other blogs where doing. From there, I ended up with two questions basically bugging me: first, how many entries does the average blog produce on a daily basis? Second, what is the size of those entries? To answer the question, I decided to start analyzing the A-list of the blog world.

Method to the madness

The first thing in preparing for this analysis was to figure out who I should pick as a subject for the study. That was the easy part, as Technorati, the blogging search engine, is generous enough to provide a Top 100 list, highlighting the superstars of the blogging world.

Sitting at the top of the list were the following blogs:

Boing Boing, which is not written by a number of people, some of whom are are also advising the company

I decided to eliminate Fark from my analysis as it was the outlier, generally not producing more than four or five words per link and not separating entries but rather keeping everything in one page, making it look very different from the regular blog format. Having done so, I decided to pick a 24 hour cycle and analyze data from that cycle for the remaining five blogs. The day I picked, May 19th, was a good day for gadget news and political blogs: in the gadget space, the E3 show was closing down. Meanwhile, the potential of a dramatic showdown in the American congress made for a lot of material for political bloggers.

I waited until the day was completed to start my research. Picking every entry one by one, I cut the entry out, pasted it on Microsoft Word, did a word count on the entry, and recorded the number in an Excel spreadsheet.

So let’s take a look at the numbers:

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Boing Boing

InstaPundit

Daily Kos

Gizmodo

EnGadget

1

120

175

202

77

13

2

136

75

105

115

118

3

247

3

2

67

147

4

145

10

4

107

78

5

94

48

171

133

151

6

62

33

297

131

111

7

67

6

7

102

171

8

196

11

159

134

101

9

67

27

785

135

111

10

101

25

527

225

85

11

294

13

231

99

85

12

165

9

316

98

152

13

50

691

401

104

101

14

64

60

130

92

103

15

32

16

892

90

88

16

111

24

352

59

114

17

202

50

201

82

174

18

283

71

470

129

210

19

50

11

391

121

122

20

49

15

2

49

204

21

32

864

642

81

94

22

32

249

647

97

68

23

40

22

47

69

113

24

23

10

245

Â

86

25

42

9

238

Â

127

26

68

254

Â

Â

119

27

42

334

Â

Â

99

28

56

169

Â

Â

106

29

72

33

Â

Â

65

30

151

Â

Â

Â

104

31

Â

Â

Â

Â

830

32

Â

Â

Â

Â

114

33

Â

Â

Â

Â

69

34

Â

Â

Â

Â

353

35

Â

Â

Â

Â

147

36

Â

Â

Â

Â

58

37

Â

Â

Â

Â

127

38

Â

Â

Â

Â

158

39

Â

Â

Â

Â

95

40

Â

Â

Â

Â

209

A cursory look at this shows a lot of interesting data. For starters, all the A list bloggers in that group posted at a rate of an entry per hour or more. However, looking at this, it was unclear how long each entry was.

I decided to massage the data a bit. Individual entry data did not provide much in the way of a clear view but aggregated information did give me a clearer picture. Let’s take a look:

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Boing Boing

InstaPundit

Daily Kos

Gizmodo

EnGadget

Average

Total

Daily Total

3093

3317

7464

2396

5580

4370

21850

# of entries

30

29

25

23

40

29.4

147

Average words/entry

103.1

114.37931

298.56

104.173913

139.5

148.639456

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The data became clearer. On that particular day, the top five bloggers created an average of 30 entries, with each entry being under 150 words. This reminds me of something Phillip Greenspun, another A-list blogger, had said about why he liked blogs:

It allows me to experiments with the three paragraph form

Considering the size of the average entry from this, it seems very clear that an entry should be brief.

However, going beyond that is the number of entries that come in on a day. Looking at this, the average Top 5 A-list blogger wrote an average of almost 30 entries. Think about it for a second or two. 30 entries! It’s a huge number for a single day.

From the reader standpoint

So let’s say you popped up your news aggregator of choice and have subscribed to each of those blogs. How much would you read? How much information would you get? Our little analysis shows you would have read a bit under 22,000 words. That would amount, in terms of printed pages, to 44 single spaced pages.

Your alternative? Well, on that day, you could have picked up the New York Times and read every stories on the front page. That would have netted you 12,964 words, or about 22 single spaced printed pages. You could have listened to the evening news, are about 3000 more words. Ultimately, you would have consumed more words reading blogs than going with mainstream media: 5 TV shows would have netted you about 15,000 words. 5 newspaper stories (assuming a different report on each story) would have netted you about 8,000 words. So blogs are much more prolific in terms of words.

Blogger burn out

Notice that I’ve carefully avoided the subject of quality in this particular analysis. This seems to be an increasing issue in the blogging world. Some bloggers, like Joi Ito and Fred Wilson are starting to worry about the quality of entries. Is this the onset of a rush to more substantial but less frequent posts? Only time will tell.